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The analysis of films often helps us to understand more thoroughly particular clinical facts and even revisit some analytic concepts or conceptions. Such is the case for the analysis of the documentary The Pageant directed by Eytan Ipeker, presented to the public in 2020. The film reveals to us a reflection on memory and, in particular, on the trivialization of a memory marked by trauma.
Since the publication in 1895 of “Studies on Hysteria”, written by Freud in collaboration with Breuer (Breuer and Freud [1895] 1955), we know that our memory is not satisfied with storing facts but that it distorts them, sometimes by erasing them, sometimes by modifying them, sometimes by simplifying them or by trivializing their affective content. Starting from the observation that hysterical individuals suffered from reminiscences, from memory without recollection, Freud and Breuer in their approach used talking therapy in order to find the recollections hidden behind the hysterical symptoms. Healing was possible by confronting the patient with their own psychic reality through the remembrance of repressed memories, and especially through the affect found through these memories.
At first these memories were supposed to have a direct origin in reality and the task of the therapist was to make the patient discover them, but this changed later, partly with the discovery of the fantasy world. Nevertheless, the element of reality in therapy was to have a decisive influence on all of Freud’s work as well as on the concepts and practices of his successors. Freud would at first be particularly interested in the functioning of the unconscious with its own laws and defence mechanisms, which are largely unconscious, such as repression or splitting that will be responsible for lost memories while maintaining a link with the historical reality of the patient.
Still following the same ideas, by studying closely the link between the laws of the unconscious and the distortions of memories, it is in